Thursday, June 23, 2016

As the School Spins – EduShyster

Today’s topic: what happens when state officials hand a school whose students are among the highest needs in Boston to a team of outside turner-arounders who have never before run a school? The answer, as this week’sBoston Globe report indicated, isnothing good. But might there be more, by which I mean less, to this story than meets the eye? Grab your handrails, reader, and steer clear of the fairground corn dogs. Things are about to get awfully spinny around here.

Tis a truth universally acknowledgedTis a truth universally acknowledged, reader, that high needs students fare best when their school is delivered into the hands of a private operator. Such is the opening line of a tale that dates back to 2014 when the state threw up its hands and bequeathed Boston’s Dever Elementary School to a well-heeled (not to mention politically connected) suitor: Blueprint Schools. Lest one think that this arranged marriage was rash, well it wasn’t. You see, various attempts had already been made to turn around the troubled school, including a goodold-fashioned browbeatingof its teachers by none other than his nibs himself: the state’s Commission of Career and College Readiness, Mitchell D. Chester. It was time to let someone else have a try…

The Dever’s new partner immediately*made waves,* as Globe writer James Vaznis reports, by asking the teachers and staff at the school to re-apply for their jobs. Or make that re-re-apply. Teachers at the Dever had been handpicked under the previous turnaround effort which gave the autonomous school leader the flexibilityto weed out teachers he didn’t like or who disagreed with the turnaround strategy. But that was the past, and unlike the previous turnaround attempt, Blueprint meant As the School Spins – EduShyster: